When Leaders Don’t Respond

How often have you sent multiple emails to someone before getting a response? How often have you received multiple emails before responding? Chances are, you’ve been on both sides of that equation. Of course, if you’ve received multiple emails and haven’t responded, you can usually identify reasons why: you’re snowed under, or you need more information, or you have other priorities, and so on… If you’re the one who hasn’t heard back, though, you might be left wondering what’s going on.

Similarly, I wonder if you’ve ever reached out to a leader of yours – a CEO, a manager, a senior leader in your organization – to bring up an idea, or broach a difficult subject, or make a request, and not heard back for several days, if at all. How does that feel? If you’ve ever been in that situation, the raw emotions of it might come back to you easily. In these situations where power dynamics and organizational hierarchy are at play, it’s all the more easy to climb our own ladder of inference and start adding our own interpretations and meanings to the situation; interpretations like “they don’t care about me,” or “I’m unimportant,” or “maybe I’m about to lose my job.”

Even when it’s not quite so extreme, without a response of any kind you’re left in a liminal space, wondering whether your message was received, or read, or understood, or simply lost in the void of someone else’s inbox. And anyone working in an organization who feels that their work is not being acknowledged, or that they aren’t important to those higher up, is much more likely to look for work elsewhere. To put that more bluntly, when leaders don’t respond, employees question their value, and the organization experiences more turnover.

Needless to say, these kinds of situation happen all the time, and we might not be able to change much of the surrounding context that causes them. Senior leaders are often being pulled in many different directions, and can’t always focus on everything that comes their way immediately. But of course, the same is true for any of us, regardless of our level in an organization; I don’t want to give the impression that senior leaders don’t have a responsibility to their direct or indirect reports. In fact, where those power dynamics and organizational hierarchy are at play, it’s particularly important for senior leaders to notice what it does to those lower in the hierarchy to not hear anything back. A full, thought-out response is not necessarily feasible; a “Thanks. I’ll need a few days to read through and respond in more detail, but just wanted to acknowledge your message” is much more doable.

If you are a manager or senior leader reading this, you can probably already infer your call to action for this week, but if you’re someone who knows that familiar feeling of not hearing back, and then stewing at night over what that might mean, what can you do about situations like this?

This Week’s Tips:

• If you are a manager or senior leader: Create a “closing your day” routine where you scan through your email/messages for anything that warrants an acknowledgement. Your response doesn’t need to be anything more than “Thanks. I’ll need a few days to read through and respond in more detail, but just wanted to acknowledge your message.” Doing so both respects the person who sent the message, and at the very least lets some of their message enter your brain and percolate until you have a chance to read in more detail. Primarily, though, it leaves the other person feeling acknowledged, like their work matters to you and to the organization.

• When sending a message to a manager or senior leader: Provide a brief bolded headline / request at the top of the message with key details (like a TL:DR version of the message, but that invites them to actually read the rest). For example, “Request for a 0.5 FTE in Partnerships to support revenue growth by 10% over the next 6 months.” Below this, you can get into the main message, including all the background, context, and so on. The headline up front means that the reader isn’t left trying to ascertain what is actually being asked for in the rest of the message.

• When in the liminal space after sending: Remember that inferences – the assumptions and meanings you make up – are not facts. Remind yourself of the facts, and consider alternatives to the conclusions you’ve drawn. Wonder what else might the senior leader be dealing with that you’re not aware of. Remember the multitude of things you are managing in life that other people you work with might not know about, and consider that that might be true for others also. Wherever possible, take deep breaths and try to let go by focusing on other things you can currently work on. Depending on the pace of your workplace, send a follow-up only after 3-5 business days as an “in case you missed it” reminder, and if you didn’t include the TL;DR headline / request at the top, include it this time around.

Try these out this week, and let us know how it goes! We’d love to hear from you.

You can subscribe to our feed here, or sign up for our weekly newsletter to get these articles directly in your inbox.